“Cognosys Technologies has launched an end to end CogDAM Digital Asset Management suite with single click encoding service with live streaming capabilities based on Azure Media Services. This media service allows clients to have a single integrated environment to manage complete media portfolio in house with feedback, rating, user tracking as well as ability to push to media server right from the convenience of a mobile phone. Images and videos of any event can be immediately transmitted to server and encoded automatically in multiple video formats including MP4, flv, swf, avi, wmv, wma etc without any manual intervention. This enables clients to stream content to any user whether on their windows laptops, mac, iphone, ipad or andorid powered phones without spending days trying to encode in multiple video formats and then get it loaded to different media servers.” [Read More]

There were a few interesting points to note about this press release – although I don’t think it will be so remarkable in the near future if the market plays out as we believe it will here at DAM News.

Cognosys are making use of Azure Media Services – the Microsoft cloud platform for providing transcoding and media manipulation services.

Rather than re-inventing their own platform, they are bolting on top of what a larger vendor (Microsoft) are providing.

This is an Indian VAR and there have historically been fewer participants from that region operating specifically in Digital Asset Management*.

*Before all the existing DAM vendors head for the exit to collect their coats, however, one should note that Cognosys’ definition of DAM and the more conventional understanding of the term is rather different.

It appears that they are more interested in climbing on the coat tails of DAM’s new found popularity rather than offering a full range of actual DAM capabilities. In fact, CognoDAM appears to cover a small range of the use cases for DAM, namely transcoding and streaming (not too much about non-video media either – save one or two words). MAM might be a better description for what they are offering. Their PR talks about how one could combine this with DRM and presumably that’s where the unmentioned metadata element of DAM could fit in also.

Well, one could do quite a lot of things, including buying a single DAM or MAM solution that offered the whole lot instead. But, it would be remiss of me to argue that the DAM industry is set for fragmentation into sub-segments composed of numerous different competing service providers while at the same time castigating one of the earlier entrants to this nascent market for doing exactly what I have predicted they might.

I wait with interest to see how many other vendors start to make use of Azure Media Services in particular and what happens with SharePoint oriented solutions (and other VARs) when they start to explore the opportunities for further horizontal integration into the DAM sector. Undoubtedly, what little remains of the money still on the table in DAM is in video and I foresee the competition for it being fierce.